What filesystem should i Use

Proxwalker

New Member
Feb 17, 2023
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Hello Guys,
I am relatively new to Virtualization and Proxmox. My current Hardware is a Dell Optiplex 5080 Mini with a single SSD and LVM. Since my SSD gave me read Errors for one of the Virtual Machines and i had some headache recovering the VM, i've decided to use RAID 1 in the Future. So i've bought a new PC (Dell Optiplex 7080 Mini) for Proxmox, where i can stick in two SSDs.

Now i've bought two identical 1TB (unfortunately consumer grade) SSDs and while setting up the new PC i've stumbled upon ZFS and it's parameters. While researching the optimal values for ZFS i've found out that ZFS literaly consumes normal SSDs and enterprise grade SSDs are recommended. I did not found a way to install Proxmox with RAID 1 without using ZFS ( there was another Filesystem with RAID Support, but that sounded like it was a Beta Version)

So is there a way to minimize the SSD wear without making the use of ZFS obsolete or should i go with an alternative? And what is that alternative
 
You can try ZFS with your workload. Then after a month have a look at the smart attributes (smartctl -a /dev/yourDisk) to see how much your SSDs weared. If you think the wear is fine, then your workload maybe isn't that demanding and ZFS works fine for you.
If not you could try two things and install it again:
1.) use the raid1 that your mainboard offers and install PVE with LVM on top of that pseudo-hardware raid array
2.) Use mdraid. While not officially supported it usually runs fine and with less wear and CPU/RAM overhead. For that you can install a Debian 11 (the installer can create a mdraid raid1 for you) and then install PVE7 on top of that Debian 11: https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Install_Proxmox_VE_on_Debian_11_Bullseye

But ZFS should be prefered if you care about your data. It not only protects your guests from failing disks with its raid1, it also prevents that your guests will corrupt over time (bit rot) while both disks are still working fine.
 
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